An excursion into certain areas of art, computers, philosophy, text, zombies, alchemy, metallurgy, music, food, creativity, pataphysics, politics, France where I worked as a cultural civil servant (yes, I do know that this is appalling), Berlin where I live and work for me, England where I come from, and so on... this may change.

(I reviewed this book for Leonardo Reviews, but reprint it here as it addresses thing-ness, hence Zombie concerns.)

Well, the things they say! Do we attend enough to things? Or to change the emphasis, do we pay enough attention to THINGS?
No, it still doesn’t really work. So used are we to dealing, in normal
discourse, with things as just stuff, that the title of Alien Phenomenology or What It’s Like To Be A Thing
comes as an almost transgressive shock. It goes skipping over living
graveyards, shorn of the dead, bats on past the philosopher’s Fledermäusen and past post-humanism.

Connected to the pleasingly named OOO or Object Oriented Ontology, Ian
Bogost’s book makes us re-examine our philosophical relationship to that
part of the universe that is not the minuscule ‘us’. For those who
thought it was a bit of a stretch to include (just some?) animals,
systems and artificial intelligences, it may seem absurd - or in this
reviewer’s case delightful - to happen again and again in this text upon
lists of things that demand, Bogost argues, to be seen as perceiving
and interacting, even if he has to use metaphor to do so. But as Gregory
Bateson used to argue, we need to see computers as metaphor machines,
able to handle syllogisms such as ‘Men die, grass dies, so men are
grass’. He told me he wanted a ‘computing Greek, not Latin’, the latter
being perhaps too pornographically meticulous. As professor of digital
media at Georgia Institute of Technology, and as a video game designer,
Bogost may naturally want his ideas to be seen in virtual worlds. But it
goes beyond that, beyond ‘mind and nature’ so to say, back into - I was
going to say ‘our world’ - the world of things. And that ‘back into’ is
just me being human about it, because of course logically there would
be no such distinction, though some things are more equal than others.

If we read just a few of his randomly or carefully chosen names of
things, we are forced, again rather joyfully I find, to consider
plumbers, cotton, bonobos, DVD players and sandstone, or the unicorn,
combine harvester, the colour red, methyl alcohol, quarks, corrugated
iron; bats (Nagel’s ‘What is it like to be a bat?’) are “both ordinary
and weird, but so is everything else: toilet seats, absinthe louches,
seagulls, trampolines.” Especially when you read this book. Just as the
word ‘hetereological’ (words that cannot refer to themselves: is
heterological heterological?) looks more and more alien the more you
consider it as a thing in itself, this text alienates every thing, in a
good way.

He also wants us to do and make things, to become practicing
philosophers in the sense that a doctor would be no good if she just
read textbooks. I am dusting off my old Meccano (Erector Set)
collections and seeking exploded diagrams of anything, or any thing, not
to understand how a submarine or iPad works, but to marvel at the
thingness. But does part A27 love, or do harm to, or appreciate part C7?
Is it ethical to screw in a screw? Anyway, ethics is itself a
‘hyperobject’, ‘exploded to infinity’. There is no panpsychism here, for
it all comes down to nothing/everything, unless you want to postulate
the Higgs boson as a unit of consciousness, and let’s not.

Of course, we are not really insulated from the idea that things have
things to say and do - eighteenth and nineteenth century stories told by
household objects*, ‘I am a camera’ etc. - but these are really saying
things are ‘like’ other things. This book is different, for it asserts
that everything, perhaps even that which does not exist, and certainly
including us, is alien and metaphorical. As he proposes, it’s not
turtles but metaphors all the way down.

You might like or loath Bogost’s possibly over-heated but apparently
necessary use of metaphor and simile in his argument - roasted chilies
lose their skins and are like the wounds of Christ, gypsum dunes
resembling a white shoreline in a Žižek daydream never reach the sea -
is the Baroque elaboration making up for the absence of a tune? - but if
you want to see what the OOO Zeitgeist is about, and be jolted out of
human-centred complacency, this might well be the book to read. The
pilot of a crashing aircraft is encouraged by air traffic control to
“Say your souls, say your souls” (i.e. how many on board?). Well, the
things they say! Perhaps we should say our things.

There are useful notes, a bibliography and, for once, a good index.

* They are called ‘it-narratives’: The Memoirs and Interesting Adventures of an Embroidered Waistcoat (1751), A Month’s Adventures of a Base Shilling ([c.1820]), The Life and Adventures of a Scotch Guinea Note (1826) - it was almost always ‘adventures’.